Inspired by some amazing personal data, a person can take over the span of a year. You will be surprised how much information you can learn from studying your own statics. We are just at the beginning of a new year. If one of your new year’s resolutions were to improve your productivity, then it might be a very good idea to start using some personal statics collector to measure and keep track of your goal.

WhatPulse is a very neat personal computer usage statics collector for your Windows. It runs in the background, as your PC boots up, and monitors every movement, every keystroke, every mouse click, every application, every sites, etc.. If you don’t mind the company that made the software to collect all those personal information back to their server, what you get out at the end might be something pretty neat.

Here is How to Get Started with WhatPulse

First, go head to whatpulse.org and download the client side application.

Then go create an account if you haven’t. You can do this either on their site or within the application. I found it’s a lot easier to just create an account from their website, since you need to create your “Computer” from the web interface anyway.

Be SURE to do this before you proceed any further. Once you have created your personal account with WhatPulse, go head to the Computers section, click “Add computer”. Give it a name you can easily distinguish.

Now go back to the desktop client, click “Check for computers” and now you should see a list of Computers from the dropdown menu. Select the one you are currently using and you are ready.

The setup is complete, you can do more customization and view the statics either from the client application directly or view a rich online report from WhatPulse site.

Here are some examples of the type of data this application can collect.

It Tracks Your Every Keystroke

It has a Mouse Heatmap

Real time Network Monitor

Most Used Applications

Conclusion

WhatPulse is not new, it has been around since 2003. If you are those people who are interested in your own computer usage and behaviour, it’s a great tool to start collect data. The downside with any of the client and server application is that those data are send back to the site. If you are not a fan of this type of mode service, you should be considering other tools that collect data and store the data locally. We will cover more of those in the future, stay tuned.